Let's start at the beginning, you examine how armed conflict affects water security...
Özerol: That's right, over the past six years we have been making an inventory of how water is used as a means of pressure and negotiation in conflicts, and also how that affects local public health. Our focus was mainly on Palestine, Iraq, Yemen and Syria.'
Schillinger: 'In the Middle East, water is a scarce resource. Humanitarian aid organisations have long known stories about how militias and fighter groups use it to get their way and what impact war has on water resources. We have verified those stories, so that it is now established as scientifically researched fact. I am mainly looking for practical applications of that knowledge.'
Can you give examples of that?
Özerol: 'In the Middle East, they mainly use desalination plants to convert seawater into drinking water. You need four factors for water purification there: personnel, infrastructure, energy, and treatment chemicals. They can all be targets of threat of war. Very concretely: recently we saw that the American president threatened to bomb this kind of installation in Iran.'
Schillinger: 'It is very broad indeed: if staff of water treatment plants flee in times of war, the knowledge is gone and everything comes to a standstill. Furthermore, you must deal with interruption of the supply of water treatment substances, literal damage to the pipes and water purification equipment due to missile strikes, or simply standstill due to greater power outages in the country. But the biggest problem, we have seen, is water pollution due to leakage of polluted water into drinking water. This can lead to health risks in no time.'
What was the aim of the NATO workshop?
Özerol: 'The workshop was part of NATO's Science for Peace and Security programme. The aim was to bring together ideas and solutions around global environmental security; in this case how military activities contribute to drinking water pollution. The project aims to devise strategies and technical solutions to protect drinking water sources. The program was quite free. Actually, all input was welcome.'
The conference was co-hosted by Donetsk University. How does this translate to Ukraine?
Özerol: 'Ukraine is a completely different story than the Middle East. Water is not scarce there, so it is used less as a trump card. But of course, the war has the same influence on all those other factors Juliane just mentioned.'
Schillinger: 'Ukraine is much more industrial. A missile attack on an industrial estate can pollute the environment considerably, for example because chemical waste ends up in the water. What struck me was that there were many contributions about the technical aspect of water purification: how do you treat pollution, how do you get the soil clean again.'
A characteristic of a conflict zone seems to be that nothing goes as planned. You can't really have a fixed policy on that, can you?
Özerol: 'That's right. That is why we make recommendations to mitigate the consequences as much as possible. Of course you don't want it to be necessary anyway. The solution should actually be very simple: just don't go to war. But the reality is different.'
Schillinger: 'We want to focus mainly on 'anticipatory action'. If you know that a situation that has arisen can escalate while there are water installations in the area, you want to look at how you can protect them as well as possible. A problem in such areas is often that people come to a central water point, where water quality is no longer monitored. You can prevent health problems by distributing home water purification kits. Or at least carry out awareness campaigns to ensure that people boil their water before use.'
What did the workshop yield?
Özerol: 'We made contacts with other experts, and we are investigating whether it makes sense to put together an information book with input from all these angles. It also became clear that there are opportunities from HORIZON Europe, with scholarships aimed at helping Ukraine. Because my expertise is mainly in the Middle East, that would be more up Juliane’s alley.'
Schillinger: 'The workshop was co-organised by the Ministry of the Environment of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. So Europe is also paying more and more attention to the safety of water installations.'
What will UT notice?
Özerol: 'We are now also working on a Deep Adaptation in the Dutch water sector project, where we are investigating scenarios on how we can continue to have access to clean drinking water if society collapses. And we have already started an interdisciplinary master’s programme in Humanitarian Engineering, where we deal with these kinds of challenges.'
